Mario Durante needs a lot more than two hands to count the ways he’s shaped business in Milton.

Wednesday he turns 80, but still looks as though he might only be approaching retirement age. May is also the month he celebrates 50 years of doing business here.

From the gas station on Hwy. 25 to the storage business on Peru Road, the Durante business name has been synonymous with success.

Personally, Durante has grown from a small-town Italian immigrant to a smart, successful businessman.

Along the way, he’s maintained the same down-to-earth humbleness that’s won him friends and a valuable reputation.

As he puts it, “I’m still down here,” he, raises his hand a foot off the ground, “not up here,” pointing to the ceiling.

“I’ve stayed the same…I’m still the same guy.”

Hard worker doesn’t come close to doing Durante justice. He’s worked his tail off and then some. Even now, approaching 80 years old, he’s up at 6 a.m. ready to go to the office off Steeles Avenue.

“I’ve got stacks of mail this high to open,” said the curly-haired gentleman, “and phone calls to make…business to do.”

In 1953, the same year Queen Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of England, Durante arrived in Halifax and headed directly to Milton with $19 in his pocket — money he borrowed from his dad in Italy to come here. His brother was his sponsor, having arrived two years earlier.

Life here started out tough for Durante, who was only 19. His brother told him he could stay with him in Milton for a week, free room and board, but after that he was on his own.

Fortunately for him, Durante wasn’t afraid of hard work.

The only words he knew in English were “Have you got a job for me?” so he landed a job crushing limestone at the quarry near Kelso. Pay was $1.25 per giant pail-full. The back-breaking job was five days a week, but being a clever businessman, Durante says he found a way to get into the site after hours on Saturday so he could work an extra half day, fill four more buckets and be ahead $5 come Monday morning.

He was living on Peru Road at the time, “where most of the immigrants settled at the time”, he said. He saw his future wife one day when she was visiting from Toronto at 17 years old.

“Whoa, she was looking good,” he said. “I’m going to marry her.”

A few years later, he did just that, shortly after the first time he talked to her, when he asked her “do you want me to carry you across that mud,” referring to the mucky ground in front of the house one day when she arrived, all dressed up, wearing a bright red blouse and red shoes. Reminiscent of the movie Life is Beautiful, she refused his offer, but agreed to go on a date.

Noemi was a housekeeper in Toronto. They married in 1956 and they’ve been in love ever since. She turned 78 on Sunday.

Soon after their wedding, they were expecting their first child and they’d go on to have three boys: Larry, Dennis and Marco and a daughter Michelle (Mangotich). All of them live within 10 kilometres of him today.

Durante began working at P.L. Robertson, where his brother worked.

Eventually, he built his first home — it’s still standing, a yellow-brick home on Highway 25, north of No. 5 Sideroad. He dug his own well, climbing down the hole, digging out buckets, one at a time that his wife, who was seven months pregnant, would empty.

On weekends, the couple packed the crib into the back of their 1949 Chevrolet, which Durante bought from the auto wreckers on Steeles Avenue for $25, and drove to a farm in Hornby on Ninth Line. They’d set up the crib under a big tree in the shade and Noemi would feed the baby when he woke up. Together, they’d work for $1 an hour, picking tomatoes or cabbage. After the day, with $16 in their pocket, they’d do their grocery shopping.

By now, he was working part-time at a gas station each weekend while his boss vacationed up north.

“I thought to myself, ‘if he can do that, I can do that’.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

Durante opened his service station in 1963, at Regional Road 25 and Hwy. 401. Durante’s Auto Service and Towing saw him rescue many abandoned drivers on the side of the road at all hours of the night.

They opened at 5 a.m. and closed at 10 p.m., with a snack bar that served coffee and sandwiches for the truckers, who worked at Dufferin Aggregates. The towing business stayed open 24 hours a day, and Durante was always on call.

Even when he arrived home after hours, he had work to do - feeding the chickens they raised that provided food.

As he branched out in business, he also followed his dreams of putting Milton on the map.

During this time, he started to buy land in the area.

It’s mind-boggling to consider the number of properties he’s bought and sold in town since.

He even has a street named after him in HighPoint Business Park called ‘Durante Way’.

In 1992, he built the Royal Canadian Mounted Police headquarters in Milton that employed more than 300 people.

His companies Scrap Metal Depot, U Need Storage, Ads at Work Inc., Durfam Development Group and AC Canada Enviro Safe have employed hundreds and hundreds of Miltonians over the last 50 years.

As soon as his sons were old enough to work, they joined the family business and have been working there since. Durante says he couldn’t have done it without them.

The last time the Leafs won the Stanley Cup in 1967, Durante bought the property where his family home remains today: nestled in the base of escarpment on Tremaine Road. For a mere $13,500, he sold his first home so he could begin building his current house, brick by brick.

Photos of his large family adorn the walls of the modest two-storey home – his four grown children and nine grandchildren at various get-togethers over the years.

“My life was work and family,” he said, adding he used to get together with close friends, like Mayor Gord Krantz for regular card games.

Krantz used to deliver oil to his home. “Your Honour was the BP oil man,” he recalled.

As Durante points out, however, business wasn’t always peaches and cream.

“To make money, I lost money too,” he said. “It’s not all roses, there’s some thorns too.

“Whatever I have, I worked for what I got.”

He points to the property where Sobeys and Gordon Food Services is located and notes the ups and downs it cost him.

Another 26 acres of land on Dublin Line South of No. 5 Side Road he bought and sold twice - once almost losing everything when the real estate market bottomed out in the late 1980s.

Durante’s proud of the fact that every cent he ever borrowed he paid back — quickly. He even paid back the $19 his father loaned him to come to Canada. And he paid back his boss after 1958, when he had to fly home to Italy to see his dad, who died following leukemia, at 55 years old.

“I was there to see him, I got two weeks leave, but I had to be back in two weeks, or my job was gone,” said Durante, who now enjoys golfing four days a week, playing bocce and cards at the Italian Club.

His daughter said her dad was generous beyond words. While he admits to helping a few people out financially without so much as a loan in writing, she said it was dozens of Miltonians he helped over the years.

“Anytime people fell on hard times with life,” she said. “He’d do whatever he could do to help.

“He always enjoyed people and family.”

Durante said a local business owner once came to him and told him he was going to lose his business if he didn’t help him out. Years later, Durante said the man thanked him every time he saw him.

But that’s the way it used to work, he said. “Where there’s a will there’s a way.”

Mangotich said she admires her father.

“Not because he is successful, but because of his honesty, courage and his desire to succeed,” she said. “He taught his kids to be humble despite of money and success.

“He taught us that you always need to save for a rainy day, you need to give to those who need more than you and that your word is the most important thing a person has.”

Only recently has he been out of commission, “put in jail” as he puts it.

He crashed to the ground at a work site, falling about 10 feet and landing directly on his heels. Unable to support the keen mind on his shoulders, his heels were crushed by the impact, leaving him bed-ridden for six weeks.

He’ll find out tomorrow if he can start standing again…and he’s itching to get back to work.

As for his business success, he says the Durante family has a reputation for being “respectable to do business with…we pay the bills.

“I never thought I’d be this successful,” he admits. “But I never gave up the dream, and that’s what you have to do.”

And the money he’s earned has also benefited Milton through the various charities Durante’s family businesses have supported over the years: Milton District Hospital Foundation, Milton Leisure Centre, Salvation Army, Cancer Society, United Way of Milton, Milton Chamber of Commerce, the Mayor’s Golf tournament, sports teams and more.